A couple/few months ago, I called Senator Amy Klobuchar’s office and said she should be more like Al Franken. By that I meant, among other things, do more visible pushback against the right, and freaking tear it up a little. The nice man I spoke to there assured me it was all about the fact that Sen. Franken was in fact a celebrity before joining the Senate, and that Sen. Klobuchar was working on other important, but less sexy, stuff. That was all good with me; I just wanted to apply a little pressure in that direction, because I think it’s valuable. Well she finally delivered, and went on a fatal rampage against some GOP idiot in the Kagan hearings who was on about how we were “more free” in 1980 or some shit. Thank you, Senator Klobuchar, for sticking it to that weasel.

Analysis here. We’ve been saying this since at least 1998, so our patience with reductionism/mechanism is wearing thin.

The verdict is in and: humans and Neanderthals interbred.

The new data indicate that humans may not have replaced Neandertals, but assimilated them into the human gene pool.

“Neandertals are not totally extinct; they live on in some of us,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and leader of the Neandertal genome project.

This has long been the Gonzo Science position.

This quote from media analyst blog Atrios’ Eschaton is a good one:

…we live in the accountability-free era, where nobody could have predicted except those who did and were right for the wrong reasons. Those who didn’t were wrong for the right reasons and are therefore still Very Serious People in good standing.

It is intended as a sarcastic comment about how the cheerleaders of the Iraq War and the financial crisis still have jobs in many cases, and in many other cases they have actually failed upward - while those who predicted the crisis somehow still remain outsiders.

That’s how politics in science works too. For instance, Fred Hoyle’s ideas are being appropriated under different guises, while his name is still mud. He was right for the wrong reasons, but once his stuff is rebranded, it can safely be used by establishment figures who were wrong for the right reasons. And so it goes.

Identified via two-million-year-old fossils, a new human ancestor dubbed Australopithecus sediba may be the “key transitional species” between the apelike australopithecines—and the first Homo, or human, species, according to a new study.

Dude has this to say-

…that [Australopithecus sediba] may very well be the Rosetta stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo.

New discoveries just keep barreling in. Is this earth-shattering or ho-hum? I’m not sure any more.

the therapeutically active components in marijuana - the cannabinoids - appear to be remarkably non-toxic to healthy cells and organs. This notable lack of toxicity is arguably because cannabinoids mimic compounds our bodies naturally produce - so-called endocannabinoids - that are pivotal for maintaining proper health and homeostasis.

In fact, in recent years scientists have discovered that the production of endocannabinoids (and their interaction with the cannabinoid receptors located throughout the body) play a key role in the regulation of proper appetite, anxiety control, blood pressure, bone mass, reproduction, and motor coordination, among other biological functions.

Just how important is this system in maintaining our health? Here’s a clue: In studies of mice genetically bred to lack a proper endocannabinoid system the most common result is premature death.

Armed with these findings, a handful of scientists have speculated that the root cause of certain disease conditions - including migraine, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and other functional conditions alleviated by clinical cannabis - may be an underlying endocannabinoid deficiency.

Now THAT’S scientific heresy! Whoo!

In honor of Homo erectus, recently accepted as the first seafarer in the human lineage of hominids and other assorted cavemen.

National Geographic brings the science in this episode of NatGeo Explorer. 

We are published regularly on dead trees in Duluth’s own Zenith City Weekly. This issue: “Cavemen of the Sea”. I’m on a boat, bitch!

An exploration of the late Robert Anton Wilson’s work.

The flavor-

A Non Euclidean Rumination On Subliminal Rationalists and Recalling Robert Anton Wilson

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”
-Robert Anton Wilson

“Positivists decline to acknowledge any a priori knowledge. They wish to reduce everything to sense perceptions. Generally they contradict themselves in that they deny introspection as experience. … They use too narrow a notion of experience and introduce an arbitrary bound on what experience is”
-Kurt Godel

Kudos to The Anomalist.

The earthquake was followed by a boom in UFO sightings, but sixteen cases occurred on the night of the tragedy alone (some of them accompanied by significant visual material) which have been subjected to study by UFO researchers.

This would seem to lend more credence to the tectonic strain theory of UFOs and the paranormal.

Timeline of habitation on the island of Flores just got pushed back 120,000 years, leading to contention:

Many scientists believe the creature evolved from a much larger-bodied species, Homo erectus, that became isolated and shrunk over time. Others point to features in the hobbit’s body - such as the length its feet to the shape of its shoulder girdle - that are very primitive and not what one would expect in dwarfed H. erectus.

These researchers have put forward the idea that H. floresiensis may have evolved from more archaic creatures that left Africa to colonise Asia even before erectus.

“Our discovery at Wolo Sege will certainly open the door to this contentious theory,” said Dr Brumm.

Time to put on the popcorn.

Let me add that all this was total, total heresy just a couple of years ago, and now the archaeology of human origins has basically exploded in a new direction.

Six hundred feet below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.

 

That’s why a NASA team was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

… it has scientists musing that if shrimp-like creatures can frolic
below 600 feet of Antarctic ice in subfreezing dark water, what about other hostile places? What about Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter?

I love any story involving surprised scientists.

The limits of green/renewable energy have been overstated, almost as if its opponents had a vested interest in the status quo.

More in this book.

Now things are getting interesting:

“We think the ev­i­dence is fi­nally show­ing that these [rap­tors] which are usu­ally con­sid­ered di­no­saurs were ac­tu­ally de­scended from birds, not the oth­er way around,” Ruben added.

…University of Kansas sci­en­tists ex­am­ined a fos­sil that showed feath­ers on all four limbs, some­what re­sem­bling a bi-plane. Glide tests based on its struc­ture con­clud­ed it would not have been prac­ti­cal for it to have flown from the ground up, but it could have glid­ed from the trees down, some­what like a mod­ern-day fly­ing squir­rel. Many re­search­ers have long be­lieved that glid­ers such as this were the an­ces­tors of mod­ern birds.

“This mod­el was not con­sist­ent with suc­cess­ful flight from the ground up, and that makes it pret­ty dif­fi­cult to make a case for a ground-dwelling the­ro­pod di­no­saur to have de­vel­oped wings and flown away,” Ruben said. “On the oth­er hand, it would have been quite pos­si­ble for birds to have evolved and then, at some point, have var­i­ous spe­cies lose their flight ca­pa­bil­i­ties and be­come ground-dwelling, flight­less an­i­mals – the rap­tors. This may be hugely up­set­ting to a lot of peo­ple, but it makes per­fect sense.”

I like this guy.

What do you effing know. Well i guess we get a new theory then, right?

“The level is somewhat higher than the most popular models had predicted, and it looks like it is going to increase with energy a little bit more steeply than we expected,” said Roland Gunter, a CMS collaboration scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US.

“I think it’s not going to be a problem, but it is one of the many things that we need to know as we move toward searches for the most rare particles and new physics,” he told BBC News.

Didn’t think so.

Theory demonstrably wrong = “something we need to know as we move toward … new physics”.

I should say so. GOD FORBID they find the less “popular” theory that predicted the results they actually got, and start using it.

He’ll be amazed to read this science article that attributes the creation of the “holographic universe” theory to these dudes in 1990s. That’s funny to me because Bohm published a vigorous scientific case for the holographic universe, the book Wholeness and the Implicate Order, in 1980.

Basically, the 1990s dudes published their work in a peer-reviewed journal, as an offshoot of well-accepted black hole work. So they get official credit. Meanwhile, although Bohm was a giant among quantum mechanics, Wholeness and the Implicate Order was a “popular” book and so doesn’t count, if you can call a book with tons of equations in it “popular.”
Seems like you would give the guy a mention is all.

Happens a lot where the heretical theories become accepted just a few years later, with the heretic not allowed a shred of acknowledgment - certainly not from the scientific press, who really are just mouthpieces for the establishment.

When Bohm said it, it was heretical and involved some “challenges to prevailing views”. Now that we know he was right about the whole holographic universe thing, maybe those challenges should get a second look too.

New research has officially “over turned” the “Primordial Soup” theory of the origin of life. It had an 80-year run where it was the dominant paradigm.

But the geochemical energy of hydrothermal vents is the new hotness:

“Textbooks have it that life arose from organic soup and that the first cells grew by fermenting these organics to generate energy in the form of ATP. We provide a new perspective on why that old and familiar view won’t work at all,” said team leader Dr Nick lane from University College London. … “It is time to cast off the shackles of fermentation in some primordial soup as ‘life without oxygen’ — an idea that dates back to a time before anybody in biology had any understanding of how ATP is made.”

Someone be sure and tell Tommy Gold, whose eye has been on deep sea vents for some time, in relation to the origin of life. Gold’s “Deep Hot Biosphere” theory (presented in a book of that title based on this paper) argues that life teems at the vents because it is upwelling from deeper inside the planet. Life’s true origin is in the geological depths, by Gold’s reckoning. And Gold is no slouch.

So, glad to see we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty, and this “primordial soup” nonsense doesn’t have to get in the way any more.

Still panspermia to contend with too, re: origin of life. Remember, even if panspermia champion Fred Hoyle was wrong about why the primordial soup idea was incorrect - it turns out it is incorrect anyway. So seems to me that Hoyle’s modern-day panspermia work should be given a second look. Because he wasn’t just criticizing the primordial soup theory, he was also advancing a positive case for panspermia, before it was cool as it were.

[The biographical side note I would offer is that Gold and Hoyle were close associates and shared a similar cognitive style - in that each found it fruitful to simply invert the common idea and see where it leads you. Don’t be too surprised if they turn out to have been right about everything.]

Trying to iron out all the ways animals sense the earth’s magnetic field, researchers have managed to overturn a “widely held view” about the functioning of certain photoreceptor molecules:

…states Dr. Reppert, “the finding provides the first genetic evidence that a vertebrate-like (photoreceptor molecule) can function as a magnetoreceptor.”

An interesting feature of the team’s work disproved a widely held view about how these proteins can chemically sense a magnetic field.

In your face!!

“These findings suggest that there is an unknown photochemical mechanism that the (photoreceptor molecules) use instead,” says Dr. Gegear, lead author on the paper, “one that we are hotly pursuing.”

Mission: tag and bag all unknown photochemical mechanisms.

Holy crap - they’ve reconstructed the colors of the feathers running down a dinosaur’s back:

Using a powerful electron microscope to look inside the feathers, researchers were able to see microscopic structures called melanosomes, which, in life, contain the pigment melanin.

…
“There’s a very clear rim of feathers running down the top of its head like a Mohican, all the way along its back,” Professor Benton described.

Bands of dark and light along the tail can be seen in the fossils. This close examination has shown that the dinosaur’s “Mohican” was russet or ginger-coloured, and that these bands were in fact ginger and white stripes.

“This is the first time anyone has ever had evidence of original colour of feathers in dinosaurs,” said Professor Benton.

…

“This discovery suggests that with more work we may be able to accurately reconstruct colour patterns in some dinosaur species, and begin to understand how those colour patterns may have functioned for camouflage or display.”

This is something like a holy dinosaur grail being discovered.

The Drake Equation’s variables continue their maddening variability:

Frank Drake, who conducted the first organized search for alien radio signals in 1960, said that the Earth – which used to pump out a loud tangle of radio waves, television signals and other radiation – has been steadily getting quieter as its communications technology improves.

Drake cited the switch from analogue to digital television – which uses a far weaker signal – and the fact that much more communications traffic is now relayed by satellites and fiber optic cables, limiting its leakage into outer space.

“Very soon we will become very undetectable,” he said. If similar changes are taking place in other technologically advanced societies, then the search for them “will be much more difficult than we imagined.”

Didn’t think of that in 1960.

Also, just let me say that the absence of Fred Hoyle’s name in this panspermia-heavy article is deplorable.

For decades, scientists have scanned the heavens in search of extraterrestrial life. Perhaps they should have looked closer to home. Variant life forms – most likely tiny microbes – could still be hanging around “right under or noses – or even in our noses,” Paul Davies, an award-winning Arizona State University physicist, told a group of scientists Tuesday.

“How do we know all life on earth descended from a single origin?” he said, speaking at London’s Royal Society, which serves as Britain’s academy of sciences. “We’ve just scratched the surface of the microbial world.”

Here we’ve got Paul fucking Davies saying what Fred Hoyle got ridiculed for saying 30 years ago. At least give the guy a mention. The fact that Hoyle was wrong about chemical evolution doesn’t make him wrong about evolution from space. At least, when Paul Davies says there’s alien microbes in your nose, it sounds great. But Fred Hoyle, not so much.

Source of much amusement here at Gonzo HQ.

Scientists have discovered that 100 years of studies based on incorrect assumptions will have to be rewritten:

A new study by scientists from Oregon State University and the Environmental Protection Agency showed — much to the surprise of the researchers — that soil clings tenaciously to the first precipitation after a dry summer, and holds it so tightly that it almost never mixes with other water.

The finding is so significant, researchers said, that they aren’t even sure yet what it may mean. But it could affect our understanding of how pollutants move through soils, how nutrients get transported from soils to streams, how streams function and even how vegetation might respond to climate change.

…”We used to believe that when new precipitation entered the soil, it mixed well with other water and eventually moved to streams. We just found out that isn’t true.”"This could have enormous implications for our understanding of watershed function,” he said. “It challenges about 100 years of conventional thinking.”

One might have thought that something as close to home as soil hydrology would be well understood by now. Findings like this illustrate that many scientific surprises lie in store, even in very well-established fields.

The conventional thinking about conventional thinking should be that one might fruitfully expect it to be wrong. Scientists such as Fred Hoyle and Tommy Gold made that their bread and butter, and while it often embroiled them in controversy, their greatest contributions were arguably made by rejecting the criteria of conservatism and standing the conventional theories on their heads. It’s not a surefire method - but as in the case of soil hydrology, it sure helps to consider that the conventional assumptions might be only, you know, assumptions.

Tests on stingrays reveal they are smart as shit, with tool use (manipulating water flow as tool) and other cognitive abilities.

It reveals that the fish, once thought a “simple reflex animal”, has cognitive abilities to rival birds, reptiles and mammals, scientists say.

… In the past, scientists have assumed that such cartilaginous fish have limited cognitive abilities, in part because they have been difficult to study, says Dr Michael Kuba from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel who undertook the latest study.

You got that? Because (in part) they were difficult to study, scientists assumed they had limited cognitive abilities. Absent any data whatsoever, the default scientific belief is that a given animal has limited cognitive abilities.

That illustrates nicely how anthropomorphism is underrated. Because the default belief of anthropomorphism is that well, any given animal is probably a lot like us. And time and time again, as in this case, it’s the anthropomorphic position that is correct, or at least, not surprised.

Terence McKenna on Novelty Theory part 1

Circa 1925, Percy Harrison Fawcett said he’d found evidence of ancient cities in the Amazon jungle:

…he reported finding large earth mounds filled with ancient and brittle pottery. Buried under the jungle floor, he claimed, were also traces of causeways and roadways. Based on this and other evidence, he insisted that the Amazon once contained large populations and at least one, if not more, advanced civilizations. Despite being dismissed and ridiculed as a crank, he set off in 1925 to find the place, which he christened the “City of Z.” He and his party, including his twenty-one-year-old son, Jack, then vanished forever—a fate that seemed to confirm the madness of such a quest.

Over the past several years, however, there has been mounting evidence that nearly everything that was once generally believed about the Amazon and its people was wrong, and that Fawcett was in fact prescient. When I followed Fawcett’s trail into the Xingu area of the Brazilian Amazon, in 2005, I met up with the archeologist Michael Heckenberger. In the very area where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z, Heckenberger and his team of researchers had discovered more than twenty pre-Columbian settlements. These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 A.D., included houses and moats and palisade walls. There were geometrically-aligned causeways and roads, and plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west. According to Heckenberger, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from two thousand to five thousand people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.

In your face!!

Saw this Wired article referenced on Kos:

When analyzing these quakes, she and her colleagues found that the mini-temblors were much more likely to occur at times when tidal stresses tended to shear the fault in the direction that it normally breaks — that is, when the Pacific tectonic plate is being pulled to the north-northwest relative to the North American tectonic plate, which lies to the east of the fault. In a sense, the added stress on a fault poised to slip acts like the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

When tidal stresses act in the other direction and therefore tend to relieve stress on the fault, the frequency of small quakes drops substantially.

That’s a new wrinkle.

Now can we just move on and find Bigfoot please?

Article contains this tasty smackdown of the Hobbit skeptics:

“Attempts to dismiss the hobbits as pathological people have failed repeatedly because the medical diagnoses of dwarfing syndromes and microcephaly bear no resemblance to the unique anatomy of Homo floresiensis,” noted Dr. Baab.

Oh snap!

Too static to cope with climate change-induced migration:

…Dr Bhagwat explained, the current system of having fixed nature reserves may need to be reconsidered.

“We have 12% of the Earth’s land surface covered in protected areas, but climate change is likely to push species out of their home ranges and out of reserves,” he added.

“So we need to look beyond reserves and create the conditions that allow the migration of species.”

Some good news in here about how coarse-grained studies “overestimate species risks,” but with the caveat that climate change is screwing things up and we’ll lose fewer species if we get out of the “nature reserve” mindset.